The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Many users assume  or have been assured by Internet companies  that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

I remember freepers trying to assure us that loyalty cards and asking for zip codes was not to track us but to make their service better. We were assured that it didn’t get specific enough to track us personally.

Then my Brother In Law recieved some awesome coupons for the items he bought all the time. The coupons were specifically tailored to his buying habits. I kid you not.

Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on, he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.”

The usual method used is either to steal the encryption passphrase, or use a passphrase-guessing program. These programs are quite useful if you know a lot about the target.

The usual method used is either to steal the encryption passphrase, or use a passphrase-guessing program. These programs are quite useful if you know a lot about the target.

Not just that, they've also apparently come up with a mechanism for storing encryption keys for commercial encryption technologies, found a way to break SSL and hack into VPNs. This will cause every country in the world to create new encryption technologies -- unbelievably broad leak.

12
posted on 09/05/2013 12:32:34 PM PDT
by Alter Kaker
(Gravitation is a theory, not a fact. It should be approached with an open mind...)

Stopping terrorism is only a new priority of theirs -- their original mission is foreign intelligence. And this leak will cause the Russians, the Chinese, the Pakistanis and probably every other country in the world to switch technologies.

15
posted on 09/05/2013 12:36:35 PM PDT
by Alter Kaker
(Gravitation is a theory, not a fact. It should be approached with an open mind...)

Wait until people start getting health insurance premium hikes based on the groceries they bought. Oh, and some stores (I’m looking at you, Target!) are requiring the cashiers to swipe the driver’s license into the cash register for all alcohol purchases. I left the cashier with that bottle of Baringer and bought one at walmart instead.

16
posted on 09/05/2013 12:40:19 PM PDT
by Orangedog
(An optimist is someone who tells you to 'cheer up' when things are going his way)

They are apprently using key-stealing to do this. The algorithms are mathmatically unbreakable, but that doesn’t matter if you swipe the key somehow.

You have to understand how SSL works to understand how this is possible. It is a three-step handshake. The server sends you a signed message, which you verify against the public certificates in your browser’s keystore. You then send it an message encrypted with its public key, and it replies with an encrypted message with a proposed symmetric key. You then accept the symmetric key, and from then on communicate in a symmetric cipher.

Now all the NSA has to have is the server’s private certificate, and it can read the asymmetric traffic and pick up the symmetric key as it is sent. If you have a buddy at Verisign, this is easily done.

What the password-guessing program does is take your personal information, like birthdays, phone numbers, street address, girlfriends and combines it into various strong passwords that you might have used.

For example, if you are Joe Blow of 486 Main Street, Anytown, Illinois 60823, and you girlfriend is Doris and you dog is Spike, it will try stuff like

doris60823spike
spike486doris
illiniDoris60823spike

...and so on. It can do thousands of combinations a second. They get hits about 25-30% of the time.

Any encryption scheme merely delays and increases the effort needed to read a message. That should be well understood by anyone who uses any encryption scheme. In some ways encryption makes your communications more vulnerable as attention tends to be focused on encrypted messages, rather than the vast number of clear text messages.

Of course the best way to keep your message safe is to use a one time use code, not a repeated cipher.

The other thing that protects your messages is the provision of vast amounts of false information with similar cipher techniques to those used with your true information. To work best, this is done with a plan as to the false ideas you want your enemy to think is true, and the true ideas you want your enemy not to know.

During WWII Germany tried to present an image of great strength, so enemies would be discouraged. They sought to plant the notion that they were manufacturing 1400 tanks a month.

Analysis of a few captured tanks in north Africa put the lie to that. The serial numbers were collected and seemed to all be very close together. Analysis of castings showed that the parts came from a small number of masters, and that put an upper limit on the rate of manufacture.

For people who seek to look behind the lies disseminated by propagandists, there is a good Wikipedia article on “The German Tank Problem”.

33
posted on 09/05/2013 1:16:38 PM PDT
by donmeaker
(Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)

It’s always been a race, someone comes up with a way of protecting something and then someone that wants that comes up with a way to crack that protection. The NSA has been doing what governments always do which is to constantly seek power and advantage. SSL and VPN’s are mostly based on public key cryptography that is old and in dire need of replacement and has been known to be vulnerable for some time. Even the newer public key algorithms are not anywhere near as good as AES so don’t expect any of them to provide protection against any government because they won’t.

The distressing thing is not that we are vulnerable but that the USG has bought and paid for so many technology companies and service providers that the encryption methods have become moot because they are using back doors to suck up everything before the data hits any encryption device. We’ve been sold out by Facebook, Goggle, Yahoo, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, etc.

Snowden did tremendous damage to our countries ability to suck up foreign intelligence and more than likely a lot of damage to the US economy long term as I see most countries moving away from US based suppliers and more towards either open source or suppliers from second and third world (read not China, Russia, UK, etc.). If I was a non-US based company or country I’d certainly be shopping elsewhere now and would imagine that a lot of them are scrambling to do just that.

How does a decrypter know it has been successful? How does it know the difference between gibberish and clear text? It’s a computer program and doesn’t understand anything. Does it look for words like “the” and “bomb”?
Don’t real terrorists use words like “the” and “Package”? Wouldn’t it write in code, like “Aunt Susie is going to deliver the package to New York”
And anyway, why would a true terrorist write in English?

In other words, if the decrypter doesn’t know what it’s looking for, what does it look for?

Personally I like Blowfish and RC4 .. many think RC4 is weak but I think it’s fine if properly implemented. It’s very easy to code RC4 for use in embedded systems. I love RC4 for its elegance and simplicity. http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/

ECC is what we need to use for public key, it’s what the NSA uses.

I imagine the NSA uses a lot of custom ASIC chips for code breaking...probably made in their own Fab. I bet NSA would be great at Bitcoin mining.

The ability of NSA to decrypt a particular implementation or type of encryption is tested by foreign adversaries by encoding false info with the system and watching to see if the U.S. takes any action based on that info.

Don’t trust anything but open-source encryption products.

For the most critical data I’d recommend the two parties create a truly random set of data using a noise source like brownian noise. Both parties must hold this data and keep it secure. This allows the parties to add a one-time-pad step to their usual encryption routine. The one-time-pad is unbreakable by any method, even when powerful quantum computers come on line they will have no hope of penetrating a one-time-pad system. The big problem with one-time-pad is you are taken back to the bad old days of the key exchange problem...secret data that must be shared by all users, it’s a drag!

Steganography must still be a huge problem for the NSA since there are nearly limitless ways to implement it. Just a few bits inside a huge data set can hold important info...how do you discern this??

It’s mathematics, it’s not hard to tell if a bunch of bits is random or contains a pattern. True randomness is very hard to do. Once data is encrypted it still can contain some non-randomness that can be discerned. The job is to decrypt to the most non-random state you can. The most non-random state might still be something like a simple book cypher so it won’t be readable yet...or it could be plain-text.

Subtle steganography is a real headache for those looking for secret meaning in masses of data.

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